Play on football field rests on cat

I'm not much of a football fan, high school or otherwise. But I am a cat person. This front page story in the Southeast Missourian from 1938 caught my eye, and I decided to feature it in a blog as we close out the gridiron season.

I've retyped the story, as the reproduction from microfilm was just too difficult to read.

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Jackson players believe in feline

With the annual high school football classic between the Cape Central Tigers and the Jackson Indians, to be played at Jackson, less than 24 hours away, members of the Jackson team are placing faith in their mascot -- an ordinary house cat -- to bring them victory. Jackson has lost two games this season, but it wasn't the mascot's fault.

For four years the Indians before each game, with exceptions, have been to a man, trekking to Sam Peterman's confectionery to pet a grayish brown cat Peterman had proffered as the team's mascot. In those four years the Indians have set up an enviable record, 30 victories, two tie games, and only four losses. This year, it was explained, the Indians forgot to pet the cat before the Chaffee and Charleston games and, whether or not Puss felt slighted and cast her spell over the team, it remains that both games resulted in defeats for Jackson.

Plenty of petting

This week the team is trying to make up to the cat. Every day Puss gets a thorough petting -- as one Indian put it, "We're really rubbing the fur off that cat this week."

To most everyone on the team she's just an ordinary cat. Peterson said the cat is about five years old. There's nothing spectacular about her. To the casual customer at Sam's place, she's just another gray cat, with a tinge of yellow and white about her feet, but for a cat, has a rather intelligent face.

Knows the players

The cat knows all members of the team and submits readily to being petted, although the going gets rather rough at times when all the footballers gather around. Let a stranger try and pet her and she immediately dashes away, disappearing through a hole in the floor near the wall to the safety of the basement.

The Missourian's photographer found three of the Indians going through the petting process on the cat the other night and when the bright flare of a photoflash exploded, the fur stood up all over her in her huff as she gave the cameraman a dirty look and could almost have said -- "Trying to put the jinx on me, eh? Well, I'll show you, you Capeite."

The Southeast Missourian's resident historian Sharon K. Sanders blogs about interesting pieces of local history pulled from the newspaper's morgue -- the place where our old editions are kept.